ICE removes Guatemalan citizen for alleged human rights violations in connection with 1982 Dos Erres
MAY 12, 2021 WASHINGTON, DCHUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATORS
ICE removes Guatemalan citizen for alleged human rights violations in connection with 1982 Dos Erres massacre
WASHINGTON — Jose Mardoqueo Ortiz Morales, who was wanted in his native country for his role in the killing of hundreds of innocent civilians in Dos Erres, Guatemala, in 1982, was turned over by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to law enforcement authorities in Guatemala Friday, May 7.
Ortiz Morales, 59, a former member of an elite Guatemalan army unit known as the Kaibiles, is accused of taking part in the massacre in which Guatemalan special forces executed 200 unarmed villagers, including women and children.
Guatemalan authorities allege Ortiz Morales was among some 20 Kaibiles who went to the remote Guatemalan village of Las Dos Erres in search of insurgents responsible for the ambush of an army convoy nearby that left 20 soldiers dead. Insurgents also made off with 21 military rifles. The Kaibiles arrived in the village in the middle of the night, and began searching for the missing weapons, forcing residents from their homes to interrogate them. No military rifles were recovered.
The Kaibiles proceeded to systematically murder the villagers, beginning with the children. According to witnesses, over the course of two days the Kaibiles bludgeoned their victims and threw their bodies into the village’s well. Others were shot or strangled; many women and girls were raped. The settlement was then razed to the ground.
More:
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ice-removes-guatemalan-citizen-alleged-human-rights-violations-connection-1982-dos
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Older article, google translated:
Involved in the Las Dos Erres case, he was arrested in the United States
By: sebastian rotella ProPublica Posted 12-01-17
The former Guatemalan military man lived in Maryland and had a decade of work at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore
José Mardoqueo Ortiz Morales was arrested on Friday at his residence in Hyattsville, Maryland, United States, accused of having participated in the massacre of the Las Dos Erres village, in the municipality of La Libertad, Petén, where a military troop executed 250 people between men, women and children, in December 1982.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials reported that Ortiz, 54, was a lawful permanent resident of the United States, who for nearly a decade had worked in a mailroom at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Now he will face charges in the US Immigration Court and a possible deportation to Guatemala, where he would be tried for his possible participation in the massacre that occurred during the internal war in the country, which lasted more than three decades.
In this case, five veterans of the Army's elite force –Kaibiles– have already been sentenced, who were proven to have participated in the military incursion into said village. Six other ex-military men are fugitives, who managed to evade capture.
The story of a survivor
In 2012, the case of Las Dos Erres and the odyssey of the survivor Óscar Ramírez Castañeda, who is currently an immigrant living in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, was narrated.
In 2011, he learned, thanks to the investigations of the Public Ministry in the aforementioned case, that the Army lieutenant that he believed was his father, was actually the head of the patrol that massacred his mother and eight siblings that December of 1982.
Ramírez, who was three years old at the time, was raised after the massacre by the family of the military man who commanded the violent incursion in Las Dos Erres.
The military man died shortly after in a car accident. When ProPublica brought his story to light in 2012, Ramírez won political asylum in the northern nation. He met his real father, who lives in Guatemala, and who would have survived thanks to the fact that he was not in the village on the day of the massacre.
The facts
On December 5, 1982, a military patrol, whose members were dressed in clothing similar to that used by the guerrillas, arrived at the scene in search of various weapons that had been stolen days before after the assault on a military commando.
They started by taking people out of their homes, separating the men, and locking the women and children in the village school.
After raping the women, they executed the men after violent interrogation. Witnesses to the massacre identified José Mardoqueo Ortiz Morales as one of the soldiers who blindfolded the victims, interrogated them, beat them with a hammer and threw them into a well in the center of the community.
Low profile
> Ortiz emigrated to the United States after the end of the internal war in Guatemala, managed to settle in the United States and used his first name José, instead of Mordecai, by which he was known to witnesses to the massacre.
Now he is in a procedure aimed at removing his legal immigrant status, which allows his deportation to the country.
https://elperiodico.com.gt/nacionales/2017/01/12/involucrado-en-caso-las-dos-erres-fue-detenido-en-estados-unidos/
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Google translated, comments from a survivor:
Massacre in Guatemala: "They took pity on me because I was pregnant"
WORLDMay 17, 2011
A survivor of the massacre in Petén, Guatemala, recounts the moments of terror that she experienced when an armed group murdered 27 peasants, including her husband, who was slaughtered
Petén, Guatemala. The husband began to implore her to be allowed to live, not to be killed because she was pregnant. His plea, coupled with the crying of one of his daughters, managed to convince his executioner. The woman was locked in a room with her two daughters and from there she listened with horror as everyone was killed, including her partner.
"One of the men who were going to kill us took pity on me when my daughter begged him not to kill me," said the woman, who was one of the three survivors of a massacre that still shakes people in Guatemala.
He still shudders when he removes from his memory the memories of that night of terror at the Los Cocos farm, paradoxically located in the municipality of La Libertad, in the Petén.
Her husband interceded for her: "Please ... please ... do not do anything to her, she is pregnant, who is going to take care of my daughters. Please do not kill her, who is going to support my children" . This is what he tells the newspaper Siglo 21, from Guatemala.
The woman, whose name was not revealed, relates that they took her by the hand and told her "that thanks to the fact that I was pregnant and that I had a daughter, they did not kill me. Then they put me and my daughters in a house and left me there. When it dawned we returned to the farm, I looked at my husband's body that was tied up and without a head. I don't know what I'm going to do now, what we were doing on the farm was planting grass, I don't understand why they did this to us. "
President Alvaro Colom revealed that there are three protected witnesses. "Obviously the woman is in a state of shock, she has been provided with all medical assistance. She is not in a position to testify at the moment. We hope that when her emotional situation returns to normal we will have a little more details," he said in an interview with Carmen Aristegui, for MVS Radio.
https://vanguardia.com.mx/masacreenguatemalaseapiadarondemiporqueestabaembarazada-725486.html
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"Cause & Effect of the Guatemalan Genocide"
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“The definition of genocide will be taken from the Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group””(Maritz).The Guatemalan Genocide began in 1981 because the Guatemalan Government believed the Mayan Indians were working toward a communist revolution. The Mayans were targeted and tortured in terrible ways because of these accusations.“At all periods of history genocide has inflicted great losses on humanity” (Kaye and Stråth 2000: 24). Over 200,000 Mayan Indians died and 1.5 million were taken from their homes or displaced(Guatemalan Genocide). Before the genocide, the Mayans were the enemies of the Guatemalans and were later made slaves and taken to refugee camps. The Guatemalan Government violated the Mayan’s human rights by destroying their crops, killing their livestock, fouling water supplies and violating cultural symbols and sacred places. If a Mayan was seen, he or she would be killed on the spot. Mayans were forced to kill their own families and watch other people’s executions. The perpetrators of this genocide was the Guatemalan Government, their army, paramilitary teams and civil patrols. Their goal and motive was to eliminate the Mayan Indians and prevent them from overriding the Guatemalan Government(Hartzell). The United States was involved in this genocide by giving money to assist the Guatemalan Government. They used the money for weapons to commit the crimes of killing people. Towards the end of the genocide, the Guatemalan Government signed a peace treaty with UNRG (Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit). The United Nations also organized a commission of Historical Clarification. People were convicted of genocide as well as crimes against humanity(Guatemalan Genocide).
https://aboutguatemalagenocide.weebly.com/cause-and-effect-of-the-guatemalan-genocide.html
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Google translated from a local newspaper:
Between 1962 and 1996 in Guatemala there was an internal armed conflict that caused the death and disappearance of more than two hundred thousand people, according to data presented by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).
91% of the recorded violations of Human Rights occurred between 1978 and 1983, under the dictatorships of Generals Romeo Lucas García (1978-1982) and Efraín Ríos Montt (1982-1983), while the so-called « National Security Doctrine ”, with which any person or organization representing any form of opposition to the State was considered an“ internal enemy ”.
On March 23, 1982, as a result of a coup, a Government Military Junta was installed in Guatemala, chaired by José Efraín Ríos Montt and also made up of members Horacio Egberto Maldonado Schaad and Francisco Luis Gordillo Martínez. On June 8, 1982, José Efraín Ríos Montt assumed the positions of President of the Republic and General Commander of the Army, remaining as President until August 31, 1983. In April 1982, the Military Junta of Government of the time issued the « National Security and Development Plan ”, which established national objectives in military, administrative, legal, social, economic and political terms. Said Plan identified the main areas of the conflict.
These military actions, carried out "with the knowledge or by order of the highest authorities of the State", consisted mainly of massacres of the population, known as massacres and "scorched earth operations." Around 626 massacres were carried out through "acts of extreme cruelty" aimed at the elimination of persons or groups of persons "defined as the enemy" and aimed at "terrorizing the population".
Among the actions perpetrated by State agents is the Las Dos Erres Parceling Massacre, which took place between December 6 and 8, 1982.
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The Las Cruces commissioner spread the rumor that the inhabitants of Las Dos Erres belonged to the guerrillas and among the evidence presented to the army, there was a sack for harvesting the harvest of one of the founders of the Parcelaciones, Federico Aquino Ruano, where the acronym FAR. These initials corresponded to his name and coincided with those of the Rebel Armed Forces. When the rumor spread in the area that the army would soon bomb the Las Dos Erres Parcel, a military convoy was ambushed by the FAR a few kilometers from Las Cruces and the FAR took 19 army rifles. As a reaction, Poptún Military Zone 23 requested the dispatch of the Kaibiles Special Platoon in order to recover the rifles. On December 4, 1982, a platoon of 17 Kaibiles arrived by plane at the Santa Elena air base, Petén, from Retalhuleu and were joined by a group of 40 Kaibiles stationed in military zone 23 in Poptún. At the Santa Elena military base, they were assigned a guide who knew the area to lead them to the Parcelaciones.
On December 6, 1982, a military action was prepared by the specialized group of the Armed Forces, during which the superiors of the platoon gathered the Kaibiles and told them that they had to dress like guerrillas to confuse the population and destroy the village, everything what was seen to move had to be killed. At around 9 p.m. they left the Santa Elena military base for Las Dos Erres, aboard civilian trucks. At around 12 o'clock at night they were made to get off the trucks and walked for approximately two hours, until they reached the Parcelaciones at two o'clock in the morning on December 7, 1982.
More:
https://elpulso.hn/2018/11/23/las-dos-erres-que-faltan-a-la-justicia/